John Fitzpatrick of MWR InfoSecurity discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in torque, a PBS-derived batch processing queueing system. The torque authentication model revolves around the use of privileged ports. If a request is not made from a privileged port then it is assumed not to be trusted or authenticated. It was found that pbs_mom does not perform a check to ensure that connections are established from a privileged port. A user who can run jobs or login to a node running pbs_server or pbs_mom can exploit this vulnerability to remotely execute code as root on the cluster by submitting a command directly to a pbs_mom daemon to queue and run a job.

For the oldstable distribution (squeeze), this problem has been fixed in version 2.4.8+dfsg-9squeeze2. For the stable distribution (wheezy), this problem has been fixed in version 2.4.16+dfsg-1+deb7u1. For the unstable distribution (sid), this problem will be fixed soon. We recommend that you upgrade your torque packages.

The TORQUE server dispatches jobs across physically separated machines. It may also be beneficial for single machines to organise the sequential execution of multiple jobs.

torque on Debian Linux

This check tests the installed software version using the apt package manager.

• http://www.debian.org/security/2013/dsa-2770.html

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Updated on 2015-03-25